Modern mobile communication devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, etc., have a feature to create and manage profiles. Each profile groups together settings for various options of the device which affect its behavior for alerting the user to various conditions, including, but not limited to, incoming calls and arrival of new messages. An example might be a profile containing “quiet” settings for all types of alerts which would be used when the user is in a meeting. To select a profile, the user generally must access the device's user interface (UI) and select the desired option. Many mobile communication devices contain some form of basic Personal Information Manager (PIM), which likely includes a user's calendar for scheduling events. This invention makes use of a user's calendar to automatically select a profile according to the events in the calendar. Although many patents describe various uses of an embedded calendar or scheduling mechanism, a teaching of a profile selection mechanism driven by a calendar is not known in the prior art.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,668,177 to Salmimaa et al., granted Dec. 23, 2003, for Method and apparatus for displaying prioritized icons in a mobile terminal, describes using the time of day or the user profile to determine which icons to display.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,662,199 to Flight et al, granted Dec. 9, 2003, for Method and apparatus for customized hosted applications, describes use of a base table and a user table to retrieve settings for applications.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,658,268 to Bodnar et al., granted Dec. 2, 2003, for Enhanced companion digital organizer for a cellular phone device, describes attaching an external device to a mobile phone which will give the mobile phone the functionality of a “smart phone.”
U.S. Pat. No. 6,553,100 to Chen et al., granted Apr. 22, 2003, for Intelligent alerting systems, describes the use of an intelligent processor to route alerts to various devices and to detect and handle alerts during a device malfunction.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,480,830 to Ford et al., granted Nov. 12, 2002, for Active calendar system, describes use of an active calendar that generates a machine readable file for use by an external resource(s), related to calendar entries.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,477,374 to Shaffer et al., granted Nov. 5, 2002, for Apparatus and method for calendar based call routing, describes the use of a user calendar, which is queried when a call reaches the PBX, to determine where to forward the call.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,459,913 to Cloutier, granted Oct. 1, 2002, for Unified alerting device and method for alerting a subscriber in a communication network based upon the result of logical functions, describes a method of using a user profile to filter alerts to one or more user devices.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,640,230 to Alexander et al., granted Oct. 28, 2003, for Calendar-driven application technique for preparing responses to incoming events, describes use of a calendar to determine how to handle income messages, e.g., EMail, voice calls, etc. An EMail application may, e.g., detect from the calendar that the user is on vacation and automatically set an “out of office” flag.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,618,716 to Horvitz, granted Sep. 9, 2003, for Computational architecture for managing the transmittal and rendering of information, alerts, and notifications, describes an architecture for handling alerts and notifications to the user. This system throttles the notifications to prevent the user from being bombarded by information.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,085,098 to Moon et al., granted Jul. 4, 2000, for Apparatus and method for automatically configuring settings of a software application in a portable intelligent communications device, describes configuring the settings of an application on a portable device based on the geographical location of the device.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,933,778 to Buhrmann et al., granted Aug. 3, 1999, for Method and apparatus for providing telecommunication services based on a subscriber profile updated by a personal information manager, describes the use of a PIM on a device to generate a profile of the user, which may be used by a network to control telecommunication services.